On Mirror, Reflect, Amy O returns to form as she documents her transition into motherhood in the early days of the pandemic while capturing her tender, effervescent and wildly catchy grunge pop songs at home with the help of a four-track tape recorder. Initially conceived as a lo-fi endeavor to capture songs made with friends in those days of uncertainty, Mirror, Reflect is an intimate and exploratory work that weaves collected home and field recordings with shimmering synths and Oelsner’s playful lyricism.

A stalwart presence in the indie underground since 2012, Mirror, Reflect came to life as Oelsner sought a way to keep both her music practice and her creative community close in the midst of lockdown. By shifting her approach to record making to emphasize process over product, the songs from Mirror, Reflect were born out of a myriad of home sessions, song-a-day projects, songwriting workshops and online collaborations. This kind of patchwork, home-spun approach was familiar to Oelsner, who made her name with her sparkling, homemade pop songs before releasing three studio albums, including her most recent album, 2019’s Shell. 

Mirror, Reflect gently shrugs off the sheen of those studio albums, as an early prenatal recording of Oelsner’s daughter’s heartbeat opens the record in the near-ambient instrumental prelude of “Honey,” a song where the fact that children under the age of two aren’t advised to consume the tacky sweetener is built out into wonderfully nuanced dispatch from the dog days of summer that’s under-bellied by both the precarity and beauty of the early months of infancy and new motherhood. 

While “Honey” is a prime example of Oelsner’s knack for finding magic in the mundane, her skill is also deeply apparent on “Dribble Dribble,” where the stick-with-you nature of the playful rhyme schemes of the children’s books that became a part of Amy’s regular literary intake are reconstituted into a lilting reflection on resilience, destruction and loss. 

Oelsner’s initiation into motherhood is inseparable from the poetic heart of Mirror, Reflect, but the album is also largely informed by the shifts in Oelsner’s relationship to herself. In “Reveal,” a track that first took shape during Oelsner’s pregnancy, she describes a time where she felt “uncomfortably perched in the middle of my “old new old new self.’” Oelsner and her partner and collaborator Justin Vollmar, who mixed the album and helped to record and produce a few tracks, reworked an early demo recording of the song into its fuzzy, jammy current iteration that acutely captures the disorientation of transition. 

It’s the levity that Amy O finds in the midst of these moments that infuses Mirror, Reflect with the sentiment that while our image of selfhood is ever-changing, we can always return to an inner sense of creativity and stability. Through playful and emotionally acute observations, Amy O turns the potentially contractive experiences of motherhood, isolation, family and aging into a freewheeling work where ephemerality and humor collide over her deft lyrical phrasing, musicality and keen observations turned poetic revelations.